Three weeks later a Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, who were from the same expedition as Whitaker, began a stunning assault on Everest’s then unclimbed West Ridge. They reached the summit by the West Ridge on May 22nd – still today one of the greatest feats in mountaineering history.

Of course every professional mountaineering expedition has sponsors to offset the costs. With the ’63 American expedition to Everest Camel cigarettes was one of the sponsors.

Here’s the ad. The caption I added from an article in Outside Magazine. It reads:

The American Tabacco Company, along with the National Geographic Society, Life, and Rainier Beer were the expedition’s biggest sponsors. In a team dispatch James Ullman (the team’s historian) wrote: ‘The smokers were horrified to discover that, instead of the expected 60,000 cigarettes, there were only 6,000; and everyone knows you can’t climb a mountain on that little nicotine.’

Sometimes I think the fates must grin as we denounce them and insist,
The only reason we can’t win is the fates themselves have missed.
Yet, there lives on the ancient claim – we win or lose within ourselves,
The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow’s game.

So you and I know deeper down there is a chance to win the crown,
But when we fail to give our best, we simply haven’t met the test
Of giving all and saving none until the game is really won.
Of showing what is meant by grit, of fighting on when others quit,

Of playing through not letting up, it’s bearing down that wins the cup.
Of taking it and taking more until we gain the winning score,
Of dreaming there’s a goal ahead, of hoping when our dreams are dead,
Of praying when our hopes have fled. Yet, losing, not afraid to fall,

If bravely we have given all, for who can ask more of a man
than giving all, it seems to me, is not so far from – Victory.
And so the fates are seldom wrong, no matter how they twist and wind,

It’s you and I who make our fates, we open up or close the gates,
On the Road Ahead or the Road Behind.

“In whatever you’re doing you must be patient. You have to have patience. We want things to happen. We talk about our youth being in patient alot – and they are. They want to change everything and think all change is progress. And when we get a little older we short of let things go and we forget there is no progress without change.

So you must have patience.

And then I believe we must have faith. I believe that we must believe, truly believe, not just give it word-service, believe that things will work out as they should providing we do what we should.

I think our tendency is to hope that things will turn out the way we want them too much of the time but we don’t do the things that are necessary to make those things become reality.”